Rate My Professor Susan Kollin

Susan Kollin is a Professor in the Department of English at Montana State University, where she directs the American Studies Program. Appointed Letters and Science Distinguished Professor in 2011, she specializes in the literatures and cultures of the American West. Kollin earned her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by an M.A. in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1995, both in English from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. A former resident of Alaska, her academic interests encompass contemporary American literature, western American studies, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, 20th- and 21st-century American literatures, feminist studies, Western American literature and film, American Studies, environmental cultural studies, feminist theory, and youth cultures. She teaches courses including LIT 335: Women & Literature.

Kollin is the author of two monographs: Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). She has edited Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and A History of Western American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her scholarship includes more than 30 essays and articles, with recent chapters appearing in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the West, Cormac McCarthy in Context, and the Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. As a leading scholar, she challenges traditional assumptions about the American West through her work on film and literature. Kollin’s honors include the Fulbright Scholar Award for 2007-2008 at the American University in Cairo, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Fellowship from Brigham Young University. She has presented in the Provost’s Lecture Series on the genre of the Western.